A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Frislander »

Salmoneus wrote:More generally, he's the voice of about 50% of the population of the country.
Seriously Sal, you're not just regurgitating this warped piece of post-referendum Brexiteer spin are you? Farage does not represent 50% of the population: by the time you take into account both those who didn't vote and those who couldn't vote (I couldn't vote in the referendum, does that mean I'm not actually part of the population of this country?) then it actually comes to just over a quarter of the population, and even then I bet a fair chunk of that would object to being painted in the same light as him. And that's not counting the fact that he wasn't actually part of the official Leave campaign, instead joining its main rival.
The even bigger problem is that if you want to pay any attention to that 50% of the population, there aren't really any alternatives to Farage. UKIP have no other members anyone has ever heard of (apart from, dear gods, Neil Fucking Hamilton *spits*), and I'm not sure they even have an official leader at the moment.
Well the BBC and I think Channel 4 have talked with Jonathan Arnott a few times, so he might be a possible alternative. Only problem is he's in the North-East (my region: our school had a Brexit debate and he was the representative of Leave) which makes him even more provincial than Paul Nuttall was, which doesn't help him.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Raphael »

Out of curiosity, what happens if a PM unexpectedly dies in office, or if a really big scandal hits and the PM resigns before their party has had time to hold a leadership election? Who gets to be PM until the leadership election is completed?

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Well now, that's an interesting question. To some degree, it's a question without a real answer: the last PM to die in office was in 1865, and shock resignations are very rare (the biggest surprise was Harold Wilson's mysterious resignation for unknown reasons in '76*, but even he gave the party a couple of weeks' notice).

However, while there's no official successor defined in the constitution, it's worth remembering the flexibility of the system. So, here are four answers that are probably all true:

1. The Queen can invite anyone she wants to form a government. Her advisors will suggest someone who will probably be able to command a majority. This is probably a real area where the monarch has some power, because in a crisis there are probably several party figures who could, at least in the short term, get the assent of their party, so the Queen can genuinely exercise a first-mover influence here. In practice of course her advisors will tell her what to do, although of course advisors may disagree. A famous example of this process is the resignation of Chamberlain in 1940 - Chamberlain asked the Queen to invite Churchill to form a government, rather than Halifax, either of whom probably have been able command a majority.
[Coincidentally, if Chamberlain hadn't resigned there might have been a crisis - unbeknownst to him, he was terminally ill and died six months later]

2. The government would rally around the obvious successor. This would usually be the Chancellor, at least in the short term, though you could imagine a Foreign Secretary, for instance, being seen as the natural successor in some circumstances. If there were a real division between supporters of two candidates, it would also be possible to select someone as a 'caretaker' - an older, second-rank figure, or perhaps the holder of a job like Party Chairman (a job with authority but litle power), just long enough to have a leadership election or weather the current crisis.
When, for instance, Campbell-Bannerman resigned, a couple of weeks before dying (he actually died in Number 10, before he had time to move out), Asquith was automatically summoned to succeed him, as the obvious replacement.
(In practice, in this sort of crisis - a major scandal, a shock death - it would be very hard for a disappointed rival candidate to launch a leadership challenge without looking opportunistic).

3. Hurry! Because leadership elections traditionally don't have to involve the membership, the leadership election can be very quick. Again, Wilson only had to preside for a couple of weeks while Labour ran an election to replace him (a real election, with six candidates and three ballots). Other than sudden death, it's hard to imagine a crisis that wouldn't allow a PM to stick around that long. These days, parties often have rules requiring popular votes among the membership, which makes this harder, but this can still be avoided. For instance, candidates might require a certain number of nominations, which could simply be withheld in an emergency situation. Or the party authorities could just decree that special circumstances applied due to the crisis.
We actually recently had an example of this sort of thing: Cameron's resignation after Brexit, which wasn't unimaginable but was still a shock. The current (it's constantly changing) Tory procedure is to have a series of ballots of MPs, eliminating the least popular candidates, until only two candidates remain, who then go to the party as a whole for a vote. But all candidates dropped out before the members got a vote, so the whole process took only two weeks or so, and that's when there wasn't even thought to be a huge rush.

4. These are dangerous times. No PM has been assassinated in office since the early 19th century. However, two recent PMs were the subject of serious assassination attempts - Major, when Number 10 came under mortar bombardment during a Cabinet meeting**, and Thatcher, when her hotel was bombed and she was very nearly killed.
In light of the current circumstances, I suspect - though I don't know for sure - that somewhere in Whitehall there is some sort of emergency document saying what to do if, say, the PM is shot, which will probably outline an emergency chain of command. This will have no constitutional significance whatsoever, but in practice I would assume that, at least in the short term, people would probably follow whatever this document says.








*theories include: general exhaustion; ideological opposition to PMs staying in power too long; general ill-health (he was in the early stages of cancer, though he didn't realise it at the time); disgust at politics; compulsion by the Americans, or to avoid assassination or coup by the Americans; or, perhaps most likely, fear of Alzheimer's.

**could we just pause for a moment here, amid the hysterical terrors of our modern age of terror, to remember that before the war on terror was around, the entire cabinet of the United Kingdom came under attack by mortar bombardment by a heavily-armed, highly-trained paramilitary force, in No 10, in the middle of Westminster! The PM! Fucking mortars! In No 10! And 7 years earlier, 5 people, including a sitting MP, were murdered in a bombing attack at a major hotel in a major city that very nearly killed the PM (her bathroom was badly damaged, but not her sitting room, where she was at the time). The government response was not to order martial law, but rather to ask the local branch of Marks and Spencers to open early the next day, so that all the surviving victims could buy new suits so they looked smart for the next day of the party conference. [exemplifying the approved attitudes of the day: when cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, whose wife was paralysed from the neck down by the bombing, was himself rushed to hospital, and asked by doctors whether he was allergic to anything, he joked: "yes, bombs."]
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Travis B. »

For some reason people have always seemed to make a bigger fuss about Islamist terrorists than the Provos... when arguably the Provos were much better at what they did than Islamist terrorists have ever been, when one looks at actual political goals and not body counts...
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by linguoboy »

Travis B. wrote:For some reason people have always seemed to make a bigger fuss about Islamist terrorists than the Provos... when arguably the Provos were much better at what they did than Islamist terrorists have ever been, when one looks at actual political goals and not body counts...
I think that depends what you imagine the Islamists' "actual political goals" to be.

This essay from Lee Harris written a year after 9/11 still resonates with me because I see all around me evidence of different groups pursuing their own "fantasy ideologies" in the theatre of politics. As long as we try to understand all acts of terror merely as instruments for advancing policy, we will miss out on a lot of people's actual motivations.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Travis B. wrote:For some reason people have always seemed to make a bigger fuss about Islamist terrorists than the Provos... when arguably the Provos were much better at what they did than Islamist terrorists have ever been, when one looks at actual political goals and not body counts...
Indeed. "Bombs" in the UK today are whatever some nutter bodged together reading the Anarchist's Cookbook. Bombs when I were a lad were thousands of pounds of explosives and obliterated city centres. A direct strike on the state these days is stabbing a policeman; times were, it was assassinating a cabinet minister.

The big difference, though, is that the Republicans, in their mainland campaigns, primarily targeted economic infrastructure; the terror element was in making people fear that at any moment they might have to evacuate (most IRA attacks, they gave warning to the authorities in just enough time to get everyone to safety if they really tried; which also meant they could create panic just by sending a false warning). Only 125 people were killed in England through the whole of the Troubles (though large numbers were injured - Manchester* alone injured over 200, but none died), though the financial costs were huge. [£1.5bn in today's money for the Baltic Exchange bombing, similar for Manchester, half that for Bishopsgate, half again for Canary Wharf, etc, and those are just the direct costs of physical repairs. The long-term irony, however, is that the huge bombings were actually a boon to the economy, allowing much-needed regeneration of these areas. Manchester in particular credits the bombing for much of its current success]

*the 1996 Manchester bombing, the third most expensive terrorist attack in history after Bishopsgate and 9/11, saw the detonation of 1,500kg of explosives. 75,000 people had to be evacuated in just 90 minutes. The explosion created a mushroom cloud 300m high, showered debris for up to half a mile, and could be heard 15 miles away.


-----

The Troubles have been in the news recently not only because of the DUP business, but because there's a trial of one of the top "supergrasses". Basically, it's turned out that during the Troubles, many of the top Republican AND Loyalist terrorist commanders were actually working for the British government all along. They murdered and ordered the murders of dozens of people in order to maintain their cover, and to pass good intelligence onto their masters - so, for instance, an IRA commander would order some soldiers to murder someone, so that the IRA commander could give the police information incriminating his soldiers. When one supergrass found out about another, they'd have them murdered too, before the other supergrass could have them murdered in turn. Things were even worse on the Loyalist side, where it seems there was overt collusion with the police - if the police didn't like a particular catholic, they'd nudge their loyalist supergrasses, who would have them murdered. Of course, since a large percentage of the people the paramilitaries killed were on their own side, this could also be true of Republican supergrasses. Most famously, the head of the IRA's unit to root out British spies was himself a British spy (with an £80k government salary), and most of the 40 people he murdered with the permission of the government were other IRA members (including some who were themselves spying for the British). It was all a little pointless, really - since these were all manipulative killers mostly interested in their own advancement, the information they gave couldn't be trusted, and almost all the people charged following their evidence were either acquitted or subsequently had their convictions overturned (when it was realised that these people, dependent on the government for both their income and their personal safety, would give any evidence they were told to give).

Anyway, one such supergrass, Gary Haggarty, has just pleaded guilty to 200 terrorist charges, all conducted under the aegis of the UK government. The charges include conspiracy to riot, intimidation, assisting offenders, converting criminal property, conspiracy to defraud, possession of an offensive weapon, conspiracy to rob, criminal damage, arson with intent, common assault, actual bodily harm, conspiracy to wound, grievous bodily harm, wounding with intent, aggravated burglary, possession of information likely to be of use to terrorists (yes, we've actually criminalised possessing information - including things like, in this case, having a DVD of a public parade), posession of terrorist property, possession of articles for use in terrorism, directing terrorism, membership of a proscribed organisation, making explosives under suspicious circumstances (presumably the suspicious circumstances were that he was making explosives - I'd find that damned suspicious, I must say...), possession of explosives under suspicious circumstances, possession of explosives with intent, conspiracy to possess firearms with intent, possession of imitation firearm with intent to cause fear or violence, carrying an imitation firearm with criminal intent, possession of firearms and ammunition with intent (66 counts! Including machine guns!), hijack, false imprisonment, kidnap, 23 counts of conspiracy to murder, aiding and abetting murder, 5 attempted murders, and 5 actual murders. Just the full and detailed list of charges he's confessed to covers 82 pages.

He's also confessed to 304 non-terrorist criminal charges, for a total 504 offences. It's expected that his sentence will be minimal, at most, because he's offered to give evidence against 15 other UVF members... and, in another twist of irony, he's also offering to testify against the police officers who were paying him to do all this stuff.

It's an unpleasant reminder of how deeply morally compromised the police and the security forces (and the government itself) became in that era.

And along similar lines: charges have, after 30 years of public lobbying, finally been brought, mostly against policemen, over the Hillsborough disaster, when 96 football fans died in a crush at a football stadium. The case has been intensely controversial, because, amongst other things:
- the disaster was largely caused by the police
- the police leaked false stories disparaging the dead to shift blame away from themselves
- half the dead could have been saved by more competent treatment by the emergency services
- 164 witness statements were altered by the police to remove any elements that might be seen as critical of the police
- 55 junior police officers were pressured to themselves retract or alter their witness statements to protect their superiors

Anyway, after 30 years, the policeman in charge of the even has now been charged with 95 counts of manslaughter, and various other people have been charged with perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by alynnidalar »

Salmoneus wrote:96 football fans died [...] 95 counts of manslaughter
Typo, or is there some reason he isn't being charged for one of the deaths?
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Raphael »

Thank you, Salmoneus!




In unrelated news, today the Speaker of the House of Commons stated during a debate that male MPs don't necessarily have to wear ties during meetings, which was apparently notable enough that several news outlets ran stories on it. Oh, and apparently some right-wing old farts don't like it.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Raphael »

Oh, and they're voting on the supportive response to the Queen's Speech right now.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Raphael »

Government won the vote. First major hurdle for May (after the election) taken.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by jmcd »

Thank you for these detailed explanations, Sal.
It's an unpleasant reminder of how deeply morally compromised the police and the security forces (and the government itself) became in that era.
It is indeed an unpleasant reminder, but how does this level of moral compromise compare to other eras?

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

alynnidalar wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:96 football fans died [...] 95 counts of manslaughter
Typo, or is there some reason he isn't being charged for one of the deaths?
94 people died on the day; one died a few days later. The 96th victim, however, spent 4 years in a coma before dying. Apparently there are technicalities around that that prevent a charge on that count. I don't know if that's because of the time between injury and death, or because the death was proximally caused by the victim's own family turning off life support. I know it was a landmark legal case at the time - the family wanted him to be allowed to die, because he was in a persistant vegetative state with no signs of awareness or prognosis for improvement. Eventually they won the court case, but I suspect that the legal complications around that make it much harder to bring a case at least for manslaughter.


jmcd: a fair point. It's hard to say, of course, because by definition police corruption is often concealed. In particular, it may well be that what looks in hindsight like a bad era may have been the same as previous eras, only with much more attention from the media and from lawyers. Things like the abolition of hanging (which meant the wrongly sentenced had a lot more time to prove their innocence), the establishment of lobby groups with legal services (Amnesty, for instance, was born in 1961 but grew massively in the 70's, from 15k members to 200k members), and the decline of the respectful press probably played a part. [and of course individuals - Gareth Pierce in particular.]

However, I think it probably was an unusually bad era. The police faced multiple threats of a sort that they were not equipped to handle. There was a crime wave. There was a lot of immigration. The was the cold war. There was unprecedented political polarisation, which seems to have put the police in a very difficult situation - they were eager to keep an eye on potential marxist terrorists, but they ended up wasting vast amounts of time and money monitoring perfectly peaceful political and economic activists who in hindsight were nothing like terrorists (a lot of the New Labour government had been under police surveillance as youngsters, for instance). There was international marxist terrorism, and an IRA campaign that seems less like terrorism and more like an all-out war. At the same time, computing was limited, so information was limited, and there was much less centralisation and co-ordination in the police forces - each police force was a local kingdom of local people with strong ties to the local power structures (at the same time that old ideas of honour and duty and feudal obedience were breaking down). A combination of frightening threats and a lack of accountability lead, I suspect, to a high point in the police's history of brutality and perversions of justice.



Raphael: yes, it's a major constitutional change for the country. The BBC even has a front-page article on whether this means the end for the tie as a garment. If MPs don't have to wear ties, then soon they may not have to wear ties at their clubs, and then maybe places like the Institute of Directors won't require ties, and then... oh heavens my! Thin end of the wedge, m'boy!
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

So, an update on our continued staggering into tomorrow...


The headline news, as Raphael has mentioned, is that the government has won the vote on the Queen's Speech - which is to say, it is actually a government and not just pretending to be one.

Under the surface, however, things aren't so great.

For a start, what was in the Queen's Speech? This, remember, is a rough to-do list of everything the government intends to do over the next year. And this year is extraordinary, because for only the second time in modern history the government has declared there won't be a Queen's Speech next year (i.e. this 'session' of parliament will last two years rather than one). It's the sort of thing we used to have civil wars about. The theory is that there is just so much to get done in this QS that it'll take twice as long as normal and there won't be time for anything else for at least two years. It also probably helps that removing the QS means removing a compulsory vote of confidence in the government, which means more chance of surviving as a government for more than 12 months.

So this QS is a biggie. A massive package of monumental reforms that'll take two years to implement it. How massive? Well, in 2015, for instance, the speech laid out plans for 25 bills for the next 12 months, with a 26th in draft form. So... a bit more than 2 bills per month on average. 2014 was quieter - 11 full bills proposed, 3 more in draft form, but then another 6 carried over that they hadn't managed to get done the year before, for a total of 20, or a bit less tha 2 a month. 2016 was busier: 20 full bills, 1 draft, 3 carried over from the year before, plus advanced warning of two other things being planned and being consulted on. Again, around 2 per month.

How big is this year's? Well, for the next 24 months, this QS proposes... 23 bills. And no fewer than eight of those are Brexit, basically one big bill to repeal Europe, and seven smaller bills to keep some things that are currently part of Europe (like the nuclear materials control framework, or fishing quotas). So the bills-per-month will only be about half what it usually is, and it'll be dominated by Brexit. Much of the non-Brexit stuff is remarkably anodyne - there's a bill to encourage the use of smart electricity meters and ensure insurance for the smart meter infrastructure, for instance. A bill making it harder to claim insurance payouts for whiplash following car accidents. A bill on updating air travel insurance regulation to reflect modern online booking practices. To require insurance for the use of automated cars. To provide a regulatory framework for space tourism. Etc.

In particular, large parts of the tory manifesto have been swept away, either due to internal opposition or due to the DUP. This is a massive signal of the weakness of both the government and the PM.

Similarly, the government was able to (by 14 votes) reject a Labour ammendment calling for an end to the public sector pay cap*... but Tory backbenchers publically supported the principal, two cabinet ministers independently said that cap may be "reconsidered", and the PM's own spokesman said that it was possible the policy would be changed in the autumn.

*For the last 4 years, pay rises in the public sector have been capped at 1% per year - before that they were capped at 0% per year for 2 years. Since inflation is 3%, this translates to a noticeable decrease in pay in real terms.

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Next there's the fact that the government had to cave at the last minute even to get this through. An ammendment was tabled that looked like winning, so the government had to, on the fly, introduce a new policy that made the ammendment unnecessary. So, from now on, abortion tourists from northern ireland will have the right to a free abortion at an NHS hospital. This is probably a good thing, but one suspects a large part of the motivation was just to say 'fuck you' to the DUP (who are the reason women can't just have abortions back in NI).

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But it's not just the government in trouble. Wildcard Labour MP Chuka Umunna*, against his leadership's instructions, tabled an ammendment requiring the UK to remain within the single market. It lost. But as many as 50 Labour MPs broke with their party to vote against it. The good PR to be had from the weakness of the government was undermined as Corbyn was forced to sack three of his own shadow cabinet for backing the bill, while a fourth member resigned.

*Umunna used to be considered a natural future PM. He's well-educated solicitor from a connected family - he went to private school, he was a cathedral chorister, and his grandfather, Sir Helenus Padraic Seosamh Milmo QC, was a prosecutor at Nuremburg (and when a guy's called Sir Helenus, it's not hard to see what class he's from). But at the same time, he grew up in South London and he's of mixed race. He's been described as an 'arch-moderate' (he was an Ed Milliband supporter). He seemed a natural Labour leader, and seemed to have the ambition to match; his friends updated his wikipedia page to call him "the British Barack Obama". But then something weird happened: he stood for the labour leadership after Milliband resigned, but then, just three days later, backed out of the race. It wasn't that he was unpopular (one poll even had him favourite to win), or even that he was clearing the way for another candidate (at that time, it hadn't been realised how much of a thread Corbyn would be to win). It was, he publically admitted, that he was "uncomfortable with the level of scrutiny" that came with the leadership bid.

What the fuck did that mean? Nobody knows. Maybe it means that he's decided he just personally hates publicity so much he's decided on avoiding a career in the limelight. Might he change his mind? Or maybe it just means that, hey, they guy was only 36 and maybe he just realised that this was a step too far, that he wasn't ready for it, and when he's a bit older he's going to be tougher and he's going to stand again. Maybe it means that he realised he probably wasn't going to win, or that he didn't want to win with labour in that state, and that was just a bad excuse for strategically backing out, and when the opportunity beckons he may still have another go. Or maybe it meant that he'd realised "oh shit, they're going to find out about [my drug habit/my zebra fetish/my wife's affair with a russian spy/my rent boys/those bribes I took/etc/delete as appopriate]", and there's some terrible secret that would torpedo any future top-rank political job. Nobody knows. So as it is, he's on the backbenches, and it's kind of like there being a rumour of a shark in the water - is it just a rumour (is he now just going to be a mildly rebellious backbencher the rest of his life?) or is there actually a shark there (is he a future leadership challenger lurking and waiting for his chance?)


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What we're seeing is what some have called "a backbencher's parliament". The rank and file on all sides have an unusual amount of power and freedom, while the leaders are now all weak. On the tory side, it only takes 7 rebels to defeat the government, and that's when the DUP are on side.

It's worth noting that although theoretically the parties can expel members, it happens very rarely. Nobody wants an exiled MP to try to run as an independent in their old constituency - they sometimes win, and even when they lose they can split the vote. So in practice MPs are kept in line with carrots, or the threat of taking carrots away. MPs hope to serve in the government in the future. Or at least to get some cushy job on a parliamentary committee. But when the party has major divisions within it, and the government is teetering on the brink, and the party leader is teetering on the brink, the analysis changes. The value of Theresa May (or indeed Jeremy Corbyn) suggesting that they may look favourably in future is a lot less when you think they'll be gone in six months. Or, indeed, when you think there's an election in six months and you're in a marginal seat and you really, really don't want to lose it and you know the party line is unpopular back home.

So it's not just that May's margin is small. It's also that defections will be more likely than normal. The UK Parliament is sort of like a pack of predators, or schoolyard bullies: when there's strong leadership, everyone's obsequious and does what the biggest predator says... but when there's no strong leadership, suddenly everyone tries to eat the weakest.

Which reminds me of one of the great parliamentary quotes. John Major, a similarly weakened Tory PM, was caught on-mike talking about his esteemed cabinet colleagues, explaining why he didn't just sack prominent members of his cabinet: "where do you think most of the poison is coming from? From the dispossessed and the never-possessed. Do we want three more of the bastards out there?" [although the quote embarrassed Major, it in the long run boosted his personal popularity by setting him against the unpopular elements of his own government; some have even suggested the 'accident' was intentional].
I suspect that Theresa May may well be privately discussing "the bastards" in the coming months...


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Meanwhile! UKIP may be getting a new leader. Or not. Anne Waters is attempting to take over the leadership. One slight problem: the existing hierarchy don't much like her. Outgoing leader Paul Nutall has said her views make him "uncomfortable". She launched her leadership bid by declaring "Islam is a killing machine". She has the backing of many grassroots UKIP members, and probably of Breitbart, who have historically supported her. However, in an unsurprising irony, UKIP, the party obsessed with restoring English democracy from the terrible threat of unelected European technocrats, is itself ruled by technocrats: all leadership candidates must be vetted and approved by a committee of the party's hierarchs before the members are allowed to vote on them. So Waters' chances look slim in the short term - the real battle will be in the longer term, whether her supporters can take over the party and force the executive committee to change. The committee instead would like to ensure the election of... oh yes, it's Nigel Farage again. Because apparently we're in a time-warp.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Raphael »

Salmoneus wrote: Next there's the fact that the government had to cave at the last minute even to get this through. An ammendment was tabled that looked like winning, so the government had to, on the fly, introduce a new policy that made the ammendment unnecessary. So, from now on, abortion tourists from northern ireland will have the right to a free abortion at an NHS hospital. This is probably a good thing, but one suspects a large part of the motivation was just to say 'fuck you' to the DUP (who are the reason women can't just have abortions back in NI).

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But it's not just the government in trouble. Wildcard Labour MP Chuka Umunna*, against his leadership's instructions, tabled an ammendment requiring the UK to remain within the single market. It lost. But as many as 50 Labour MPs broke with their party to vote against it. The good PR to be had from the weakness of the government was undermined as Corbyn was forced to sack three of his own shadow cabinet for backing the bill, while a fourth member resigned.
For our American friends: The term "to table" apparently means exact opposite things in American and British parliamentary procedures. In the US, it seems to mean that something won't be dealt with right now, and probably not ever. In the UK, it seems to mean that something will be dealt with right now, or at least in the current meeting.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Raphael »

Salmoneus wrote:
alynnidalar wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:96 football fans died [...] 95 counts of manslaughter
Typo, or is there some reason he isn't being charged for one of the deaths?
94 people died on the day; one died a few days later. The 96th victim, however, spent 4 years in a coma before dying. Apparently there are technicalities around that that prevent a charge on that count. I don't know if that's because of the time between injury and death, or because the death was proximally caused by the victim's own family turning off life support. I know it was a landmark legal case at the time - the family wanted him to be allowed to die, because he was in a persistant vegetative state with no signs of awareness or prognosis for improvement. Eventually they won the court case, but I suspect that the legal complications around that make it much harder to bring a case at least for manslaughter.
I guess the likely reason why he can't be charged on that count is the Year and a day rule, a very old part of English common law that used to say that you can only be charged with any form of homicide if your alleged victim died within a year and a day of the act that allegedly killed them. That rule was fairly outdated thanks to the advances in modern medicine, so it was abolished in England in 1996, seven years after Hillsborough.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by mèþru »

What about Coburn, Walker and Whittle?
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Axiem »

Raphael wrote: For our American friends: The term "to table" apparently means exact opposite things in American and British parliamentary procedures. In the US, it seems to mean that something won't be dealt with right now, and probably not ever. In the UK, it seems to mean that something will be dealt with right now, or at least in the current meeting.
I am given to understand that this caused a great deal of confusion during World War II.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Ars Lande »

Fascinating stuff, as always! Thanks, Sal.
Salmoneus wrote:Sir Helenus Padraic Seosamh Milmo QC,
There's some serious potential for a "Harry Potter minor character or British politician" game here.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

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Ars Lande wrote:Fascinating stuff, as always! Thanks, Sal.
Salmoneus wrote:Sir Helenus Padraic Seosamh Milmo QC,
There's some serious potential for a "Harry Potter minor character or British politician" game here.
Actually, "Padraic Seosamh" sounds a lot more Irish than British to me.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Frislander »

Raphael wrote:
Ars Lande wrote:Fascinating stuff, as always! Thanks, Sal.
Salmoneus wrote:Sir Helenus Padraic Seosamh Milmo QC,
There's some serious potential for a "Harry Potter minor character or British politician" game here.
Actually, "Padraic Seosamh" sounds a lot more Irish than British to me.
Indeed, but that's beside the point: there is at least one Irish student in Hogwarts (namely Seamus Finnigan), and Mad-Eye Moody was played by an Irishman (if his character isn't Irish to begin with).
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Frislander wrote:
Raphael wrote:
Ars Lande wrote:Fascinating stuff, as always! Thanks, Sal.
Salmoneus wrote:Sir Helenus Padraic Seosamh Milmo QC,
There's some serious potential for a "Harry Potter minor character or British politician" game here.
Actually, "Padraic Seosamh" sounds a lot more Irish than British to me.
Indeed, but that's beside the point: there is at least one Irish student in Hogwarts (namely Seamus Finnigan), and Mad-Eye Moody was played by an Irishman (if his character isn't Irish to begin with).
...and more to the point (i.e. concerning reality rather than Harry Potter), the British and the Irish have been inextricably linked for centuries, particularly their aristocracies. Yes, Milmo was born in Ireland, and in fact grew up in a gaeltacht in galway, but he was born in 1908, so that didn't preclude him also being British. Indeed, it still wouldn't - we have mutual recognition of each other's citizens as non-foreigners. For instance, Irish citizens are, except in exceptional cases, automatically allowed to travel to the UK, and if they choose to reside here they are automatically granted settled status (a huge number are also automatically citizens here if they want to be). So the Irish have always made up a sizeable portion of the British population, particularly of the aristocrats and particularly of the legal, academic, journalistic and literary professions. [About a quarter of all English people are descended from Irish immigrants]

For instance, I think somewhere above we probably mentioned former Tory Chancellor and current critic of the PM, George Osborne. He's the heir to an Irish baronetcy (and also has a Hungarian grandmother). We might also mention former PM Tony Blair - his mother was born in Donegal. Zac Goldsmith, the last Tory candidate for Mayor of London, is the son of Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, heiress to the marquessate of Londonderry.


But also, this is to a lesser extent true to aristocracy around the world. Sir Helenus Milmo, for example, was also a relative of Don Patricio Milmo, founder of the Bank of Laredo, whose descendents currently own the world's largest Spanish-language television network...


-------


Back in political news: May's resisting U-turning on the pay cap so far, but in a sign of her weakness, even her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson*, has openly told her to change her policy.


*on the ethnicity front: full name Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Grandparents include Elias Loewe (an American Jew of Russian origin), and great-grandparents include Hubert Freiherr von Pfeffel, Helene von Rivière, and Ali Kemal (minister of the interior to Damat Ferid Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire).
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Ars Lande »

I got confused by UK/Great Britain terminology. Sorry about that :). By the way, are people from Northern Ireland "British"? I'm not sure there is a actually a good answer to that question...

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

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Ars Lande wrote:I got confused by UK/Great Britain terminology. Sorry about that :). By the way, are people from Northern Ireland "British"? I'm not sure there is a actually a good answer to that question...
Yes and no; it depends on who you ask. There's also a third answer, "I don't actually know, now I come to think about it".
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Depends what you mean by "British". No, they're not British in the sense of being physically from Britain. Many may, however, see themselves as British ethnically. Moreover, they are legally "British" in the sense of being British citizens and British nationals.

This isn't really specifically electoral, but since it's come up: British nationality law!

Most places have a simple category of people they recognise as 'citizens', or 'nationals'. Britain does it a bit more complicatedly.

There are currently six different types of British national:
- British Citizens, divided into those by descent and those other than by descent (who have different rights when it comes to passing on citizenship)

- British Overseas Territories Citizens, divided into those from the sovereign bases on cyprus and those from elsewhere - those not from the sovereign bases have the right to acquire british citizenship if they want, but those from the bases do not. There is also an exception for BOTCs from Gibralter (they cannot be refused citizenship for bad conduct and they cannot be refused for having renounced citizenship). BOTC status is independent of Belonger status. Belongers are those designated by each territory as those who belong to that territory - effectively a sub-national nationality system. You can have BOTC status without being a Belonger, and Belonger status without BOTC status. BOTC status, notably, is not just for people from what are now British territories. It's also for people from Kitts and Nevis (and independent country) who refused to accept Kitts and Nevis citizenship.

- British Nationals (Overseas), are a special class split off from BOTCs (or more accurately from BDTCs, their predecessor), and are all connected to Hong Kong.

- British Overseas Citizens includes former BDTCs from Hong Kong who failed to apply to become BN(O)s, and also citizens of former colonies where something weird happened. In particular, former citizens of Penang are now BOCs, because Penang never actually became independent, but was instead handed over to the control of Malaysia. [the basic principle here is that old colonial citizens, on independence, either became citizens of the new country (because they'd chosen to leave the empire), or renounced that new country and became British if they had strong ties to Britain. Since the citizens of places like Penang never gained their own sovereignty, it was considered unfair to deprive them of connection to the crown, even if they didn't qualify for actual british citizenship. Likewise Hong Kong, where the locals left the empire but never actually gained sovereignty, and Britain wanted to ensure some level of protection for at least some of them].

- British Protected Persons are a weird group in that they were never Commonwealth citizens. These are basically like BOCs, but from places that were never ours to begin with - protectorates, protected states, mandates, and trust territories. If they didn't want to become citizens of those countries on independence, they retained BPP status, providing they weren't from Aden, Somaliland, or a Protected State (Protectorates are fine, though - so if you're from, say, Kamaran* or the Nyasaland Protectorate, you're fine, but if you're from, say, the Trucial State of Umm al-Qawain, you're out of luck. Except that BPPs are divided into statutory and royal prerogative BPPs, and you can still theoretically aquire RP BPP status without having entitlement to statutory BPP status...). Anyway, because they're not from the commonwealth they have different rights, and are neither citizens nor aliens. They are not considered nationals by the UK, but the UK recognises that they are British nationals under international law.

- British subjects are people born in Ireland prior to 1949, and certain people from Pakistan and India who would otherwise be stateless. Notably, 'British subjects' according to the UK different from 'British subjects' according to other countries (eg Australia).

There are then also the categories of Irish citizen and EEA or Swiss citizen, who each have their own citizenship rights here. Irish citizens in particular are basically the same as British citizens.

But THEN it's important to remember that this is all about internal UK law, and the definitions of the law of other bodies differs. So! Citizens of the Channel Islands and the Isle of Mann are all considered British citizens, even though those are not part of Britain (or, indeed, even the UK). But the Isle of Mann is not part of the EU, so Manx British Citizens are NOT EU citizens. Contrariwise, Gibralter is not part of Britain but is part of the EU, so although its citizens are only BOTCs and not BCs, they are EU citizens. Simple!

-----

It's best not to worry about any of this. In particular, questions like "are the Northern Irish British?" are best answered by pretending not to have heard, because you're in a minefield there. The general answer is 'whatever is easiest to take offence at'. For instance, go around saying they're not British and you have a bunch of Loyalists trying to kill you. On the other hand, imply that they are British and everyone from both sides will take offence. Recently, UK sports teams have been branded "Team GB", for example, which has been taken (correctly) as evidence of the mainland's complete lack of interest in the existence of NI.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Raphael »

That kind of makes me wonder - as of now, the UK is still a member of the EU, and it has been one for a while. How exactly does having a whole lot of different categories of citizens square with EU human rights laws? Then again, perhaps when those EU human rights laws were written, the British negotiators managed to get some exceptions for themselves into the fine print.

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